Si ce livre pouvait me rapprocher de toi (that's the French title -- there's no English translation that I'm aware of) was written in 1999 by Jean-Paul Dubois.

I came to it by way of a podcast I've mentioned before: One Thing in a French Day. In this episode, Nathalie Iris expresses huge enthusiasm for this author, describing his writing as funny, moving, and universally appealing. 

And indeed, he won the Prix Goncourt in 2019.

Personally I found it a slightly odd book... 

The story opens in Canada, at the beginning of a new year, with Paul, the 48-year-old narrator, interrogating himself: "All I have in my head is this nagging question, heavy with the weight of a lifetime: what do I have inside me that has always prevented me from living in peace?" This question had taken hold of him, exhausting him during the day, and causing him to grind his teeth at night.

He tells us that over the previous year he has learnt lots of things about his father, and also about himself -- most notably that he had erred in choosing to be a writer, and rather than admitting that, had simply persisted in the error. More generally he regrets the human tendency to take on inappropriate roles, to live in houses that are too big, to make do with shrunken emotional lives: "If our teeth grind together in the night it is because they are angry at seeing what we have become, what we have given up on bit by bit, to the point of just writing about what we will never be."

So that reels you in. There's that question, shared by all the anxious among us, to a greater or lesser extent; there's that promise of self-discovery. And according to this source, Dubois knows what he's talking about in terms of anxiety. When he was eight years old, he learned that his father had been diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. The sick man actually lived for another 20 years, but the boy became acutely aware of the fragility of life. "I live in anxiety," he says, "and I will die in anxiety. So I write about that." 


British Columbia, Canada, 2004

After that the story is a kind of Bildungsroman, as we review what led Paul to this particular point in his life. We find out that his mother died in a flying accident in 1976, and his father drowned in a lake in Canada in 1985 (I learned from various reviewers quoted below that this kind of untimely parental death is not uncommon in Dubois's work, no doubt because of the circumstance already mentioned).

Before either of these losses, however, Paul leaves Toulouse. Light-hearted, easy-going, and unambitious, he takes up a job in the tourist industry in British Columbia. When he lands in Vancouver he knows immediately that his best years will be lived in this place. He loves his work on Grouse Mountain and on Victoria Island.



So what happened to him? Well, he married. And he left British Columbia, which he says he never should have done.

He and his American wife, Anna, go to live for six months in the "austere, pounding suburbs of Detroit". He lives in a wing of the sprawling mansion belonging to his wife's family. He misses nature.

Then they return to Toulouse. He finds out he can't have children. They make a trip to Detroit every year but, unable to found a family of his own, he feels alone in the middle of the Davenport "tribe". He is reminded on every visit of how different -- how "American" -- his wife is. And her family place no value on the books that Paul makes a living by writing. Her father asks him: "Don't you think it's time to find a real job where you could earn an appropriate living?", and expresses in no uncertain terms his view that writing fiction shows a lack of ambition, and Paul should be focusing on writing "how to" guides of some description.

Paul and Anna stay married for 13 years. But pretty much everything about their lives boils down to a few "insignificant family anecdotes". Eventually she decides to divorce him. He's 46. Without much to fall back on, he starts to think about his father, starts to feel the need to know more about him.  

He is also disillusioned with his writing, and longs to "return to the reality of the world". The death of his dog pushes him to take the final step. He decides to embark on a journey to North America.

He goes to the US first, taking on odd jobs with even odder people in various parts of Florida, and associating at one point (unknowingly) with homicidal racists.

It's at this point -- when we're about half-way through the book, and I was definitely starting to feel that a little more direction would be nice -- that he decides to visit the Canadian lake where his father drowned. Even then he doesn't get there immediately. He does some sight-seeing with a friend not far from Montreal, and falls ill with some presumed virus that makes him lose his balance. 



Finally, in the sixth chapter of ten, he's staying with Jean, a friend of his late father, where he feels very much at home and at peace. But Jean shows him that his father had lived a double life, and here in Canada not only had another partner (now deceased), but also a daughter, who owns a local restaurant. So Paul is not an only child. Initially, he experiences a kind of jealousy; subsequently, he feels comforted by the fact that he is no longer alone in the world, and has a sister. Because their father didn't facilitate their introduction, however, he doesn't introduce himself either. But he feels a sense of completion.

Far from wiping out the desire to see the lake where his father died, all this information tends to feed it. So Paul arranges to rent a boat and a cabin, and Jean drops him off in the appropriate place. "Don't stay too long," warns Jean, "This isn't a good place for you."

He experiences a day of rain, and he gets to know the insufferable Goodwins. Here's another couple convinced that fiction is a waste of time... They have had their share of pain, but basically they're horrible people, full of north-south prejudices that they export even into their judgements of Toulouse. He goes fishing and moose-hunting with them, and is pretty disgusted by it all.

And then he decides to walk out via "les Bois sales" (the nasty woods -- so-called because they are entirely wild and trackless, and people get lost without trace there).

Why does he decide this? To prove himself? To show he is a worthy child of his father -- better, even, than his father, if he survives? To get back to the reality he has been missing in his writing? Hard to say...

He sets off, woefully unprepared. And frankly I find it hard to empathize with such an incredibly foolhardy mission.

In one of his many internal dialogues en route through this extraordinarily inhospitable territory, he says to himself: "It's your past that you're trying to escape, your history, what you've become... It's not for Dad that you're here. It's because of all this emptiness that weighs so heavily, and that you exhaust yourself carrying within you... But know one thing: you will never escape the creature that preys on you. It will follow you everywhere. Because that predator is you."

After monstrous suffering -- hunger, thirst, pain, illness, cold, fear, hallucinations -- he emerges onto a road and is rescued. Waking up in hospital, he sees Jean and his sister, who now knows she's his sister. He was missing for 13 days. (And how irresponsible, I think, to have caused all this hoo-ha of people in helicopters and hydroplanes searching for him...)

 

He decides to stay in this part of Canada, where he feels at ease. For the moment he is relieved of all the questions that deprive him of peace. He knows they will return, and hopes he'll be able to muster the kind of courage he showed on his expedition in order to face them down.

In the end he becomes aware that by undertaking his madcap scheme, "I had confusedly realized the dream of every man: to cross the forest of his fears to reach these secret emotions, these tiny bits of happiness that are in us, lurking in a place we do not know, and that, often, we spend a lifetime seeking."

Hmmm...

As you look back through the book you find little breadcrumbs pointing to these later revelations. Early in the piece, for example, he tells us that he never gets lost. Exceptionally, he experiences something like total disorientation when he drives away after his divorce. But ultimately, his ability to find his way saves his life. Similarly, in Chapter 2, he sums himself up as "a poorly crafted only son, with a soul that's valiant but insufficiently tempered". Of course by the end, only the "valiant" part of these descriptors remains apt.



All in all, though I sympathize with the quest, I'm not entirely convinced by its resolution. And though I generally like the Bildungsroman genre, I felt there was something off about the structure of this one. This reviewer is also a little underwhelmed, describing it as the Dubois she least enjoyed.

But others, like Nathalie, are enthusiastic. One reviewer writes: "What a marvel this little novel is: starting very slowly, the rhythm grows louder, stronger; the tension rises, emotions occupy the entire space. Between nature writing and initiation story, the place of the father (as often in Dubois's novels) becomes massive, and links itself with this beautiful Canadian landscape. More than once I was overwhelmed; the book really spoke to me; I identified with this fatherless character and his quest for love."

Another writes in similar vein: "In all of Jean-Paul Dubois's novels I find a little music that offers balm to my heart, a simple and precise style of writing, a touch of nostalgia and melancholy, a touch of humour that sometimes borders on the absurd... [He is] an author who, decidedly, knows how to speak to me, and touch my heart."

So maybe I'm just a hard-hearted old thing...



One final observation, which is about Dubois and his writing. Paul, the main character, is an author, as we've said. He's rather dismissive of his successes, and sees only a limited value in what he does: "A book never made anything better -- not the person writing it, nor the person reading it."

This is to some extent reflective of Dubois himself. According to Le Point, he chose this way of earning a living because it gives him more freedom to do other things: "He asserts without batting an eyelid that if asked to choose between a book and a pair of shoes, he would always choose the pair of shoes."

That sits a little badly with me, I must admit. I'm sentimental about the business of books, and hearing an author devalue them somehow makes me, as a reader, feel mocked, or at least disparaged.

According to this brief sketch, Dubois also follows a very distinctive writing process. He finishes his books in one month flat. In March, to be precise, because it's "a rotten month": "When you write a book over a very short period of time, you have to be alert. It's like I don't sleep for 30 days. It's a stupid method, I don't advertise it! But these are 15-hour days during which I am hyper-focused. I work from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m., with one hour of cycling between mid-day and one o'clock; in the afternoon I reread what I did the day before. I don't reread any more. Very rigorous. And for me, it is an efficient way of working. The brain is like a steam engine -- you have to start it. Afterwards, it drops back down again, and you just want to be a guy who watches rugby games in front of his TV while eating sweets."

He always fears he won't make it: "It's only by page 100 that I say to myself: you'll get there."

Interesting.